


Tally

by telm_393



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Abandonment, Character Study, Collection: Purimgifts Day 1, Gen, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-19
Updated: 2016-03-19
Packaged: 2018-05-27 15:33:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 596
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6290053
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/telm_393/pseuds/telm_393
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are seven indents carved on the wall of her new room in Jakku, the day Rey cuts off all her hair.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tally

**Author's Note:**

  * For [brilligspoons](https://archiveofourown.org/users/brilligspoons/gifts).



[](http://s1070.photobucket.com/user/nia939/media/TALLY%20GRAPHIC_zpszbdeggf8.jpg.html)

There are seven indents carved on the wall of her new room in Jakku, the day Rey cuts off all her hair. She doesn’t remember who exactly started putting it up like it usually is, in those three parts, but she knows that looking in reflective surfaces makes her heart twist, because that style is hers, but she’s not sure if she’s supposed to be her anymore. 

She isn’t sure if she’s supposed to be a new person now that she’s been left here.

Not left behind, though, never left behind. Her family will come back for her. They have to.

Rey does not fully understand why she is here now, all alone, other than the basics, that her family couldn’t take care of her anymore— _I could’ve taken care of them,_ she thinks, grief heavy in her heart—but she will live, and she will see her family again.

That means that Rey’s not alone, no matter how alone she may feel. It’s hot here, so hot that the sun burns her skin pink, and the sand stings her eyes. Rey doesn’t entirely understand why she’s here, but she’s sure that she’s making a sacrifice. She must be, because this place feels like a sacrifice.

Rey tells herself that she’s proud that even though she’s young, she can make sacrifices for the people that she loves.

But on the day with seven indents, when she realizes that she’s been here for so little time though it’s felt like forever, rage rushes through her body like the water there’s not enough of and she bites one of the cloths she wraps around her hands to keep her screaming muffled, because it’s for the best, she thinks, if those that live close to her don’t remember that she’s here. The cloth is gritty with sand and she doesn’t want to be alone, alone and so small in the huge rolling dunes of this planet. She doesn’t want this place. She wants a home.

She’s afraid that someday, this’ll feel like her home.

_I’m still little,_ she thinks, dizzy with grief and desperate, guilty anger at having been left here, dropped off like so many metal scraps, no matter the reason.

Rey doesn’t know what to do to communicate this baseless rage that she’s feeling, but when she sees herself reflected in the metal of her food plate, her hair stands out to her, the drooping three-part style, and she screams into her cloth and takes a pair of dull scissors and, before she can think it through, saws through her fine brown hair, matted with sand and brittle with dried sweat.

She looks at her reflection in her food plate again, at the skinny, ugly little girl with her sunken eyes wide in horror and her hair chopped off, and she begins to cry, because she looks like a different person and she doesn’t want to be.

She doesn’t know what got into her.

Rey sinks to the floor.

It’s gritty with sand.

Here, there’s sand everywhere, sand, sand, sand gets in everything, twenty years from now all that she will be is sand.

She touches the back of her head, the torn off remnants of her hair, and thinks: _I don’t want to be something different. I want to be Rey._

She buries her face in her hands and her sobs choke her, but even though she’s still crying, she knows, somewhere in her wild, confused, guilty, _angry_ grief, that she’ll grow back her hair, and she’ll put it up like she does, and she’ll live.


End file.
